Puppy obedience training is the cornerstone of a great, lifelong relationship with your dog. Without a sound basis of understanding of what behaviour is acceptable and what is not acceptable, your puppy and the dog that it becomes, and you, are on a collision course.

Almost every puppy born seems to come with a job description specially designed to wreck any household in the shortest possible time. Chewing family heirlooms, urinating and worse on the brand new carpet, terrorising the family cat and ripping the garden to shreds are all well documented puppy activities.

Given how mother nature works, it is perhaps not surprising to learn that all these apparently anti social behaviours are in fact necessary for the physical and mental development of the puppy. If they don't exercise, mark their territory and practise their hunting and fighting skills, then how are they to survive in later life?

The obvious human answer of course is that they don't need many of these skills anymore - but it is probably going to take mother nature a few more million years of evolution to cotton onto that.

In the meantime, puppy obedience training can go a long way to channeling their behaviour towards a more socially acceptable norm (for humans anyway). But that is not the end of the story.

Puppy obedience training cannot be successfully carried out from a human perspective. In other words, what works with humans wont necessarily work with puppies. In fact, in most cases, you will land up with a totally unintended outcome.

So before embarking on any form of puppy obedience training, we humans must first seek to understand (with apologies to Stephen Covey!) how a puppy will interpret, and therefore react to our "training". We need to understand cause and effect and have some insight into what is driving a specific unwanted behaviour.

In the end, we have to accept that we are unlikely to be able to override the genetic imprint for behaviour. However, educated and consistent puppy obedience training can go a long way towards adapting and channeling a puppy's behaviour in such a way that it is not detrimental to the puppy's development and at the same time helps to build and strengthen the human - pet relationship.

Keith Perrett is a qualified Veterinarian. Visit www.pet-health-for-humans.com/pet-behaviour-problems.html to find some suggestions for puppy obedience training

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